Somewhere over the chalk rainbow hope still remains
All this week under the sort of impossibly blue skies that remind me of a Hockney painting of Los Angeles, rainbows have been springing up everywhere I look.
I counted a couple on my street yesterday during my daily allotted stroll, one chalked on to the pavement by next door’s children enjoying a spot of home schooling and another pasted into a front window.
Further afield they have appeared all over the neighbourhood as a sign of defiance against the virus. The Black Death had the ring’a’roses and Covid-19 has the rainbow.
It seems, to me at least, a fitting symbol. Formed when sunlight is scattered from raindrops into the eye line of an observer, rainbows are the product of dichotomies.
As I’m sure is the case with many others coming to terms with lockdown in recent days, I have felt my own mood wavering from hope to despair and back again. It is in the gap between the two that a rainbow forms.
While hand-drawn rainbows are spreading, it may be a while yet before many of us see one for real. The prolonged high pressure is due to continue over the weekend, although on Sunday bitter north-easterly winds will begin to establish across the UK. Overnight temperatures will fall close to freezing and by day struggle to reach double digits.
Still, there will be snow and sleet for some and a few drops of rain for others in between sunny spells, so worth still keeping an eye upwards. If nothing else it is still a novelty to see the lack of vapour trails streaking the sky.
There is another way in which the rainbow (hopefully) symbolises the coronavirus outbreak – as a fleeting phenomenon which never lasts.
The days and weeks separated from loved ones may feel interminable, but keep looking for the pot of gold at the end. It will all be over soon enough.